Exactly. Whether laws written by the government apply to the government depends entirely on exactly how embarrassing the situation is, and how well connected the particular politician (or other government official) is (versus how well connected his opponents are).

NASA is very strict about what leaves the county even in an employee email. Everything, including computer software and documentation, must be submitted to a department within NASA for approval and an ITAR compliance statement attached to it. It's such a hassle that it almost makes it impossible to work with international partners of friendly nations (Norway for example). It's probably about some mundane engineering material necessary to insure compatibility with an international partner that some bureaucratic bean-counter is trying to use to justify his or her otherwise undeserved salary.

Same can be said about stealth fighters, ICBMs, and anything else developed with tax payer dollars. Not 100% sure all of that information should be publicly available however.

Why not? When a government has exclusive right to military technology, they in effect have an exclusive right to unlimited power, which is a gross violation of the Constitutional principle of liberty.

Note that the Second Amendment provides no exclusions regarding what arms the citizens are allowed to own and carry - also note that the reason the Second Amendment exists is to allow the citizenry to defend ourselves not from each other, but from a tyrannical, oppressive government.

Note that the Second Amendment provides no exclusions regarding what arms the citizens are allowed to own and carry

I'm sorry, I'm all for second amendment rights, but I don't think the framers of the constitution could possibly conceive weapons of mass destruction like nukes and biological weapons. I for one don't want you or anyone you know owning such weapons, ICBMs, ballistic missiles, etc.

...then we would not have to worry about it now as that constitution would no longer exist as the US would have been taken over by the first government that made such weapons.

Uh... you don't follow politics much, do you? I ask because that nightmare scenario you mention there, that the Constitution would "no longer exist" if the US were "taken over by the first government that made such weapons?" Yea, about that...

I don't think the framers of the constitution could possibly conceive weapons of mass destruction like nukes and biological weapons.

Nukes, perhaps not, but biological warfare has been around since party A realized that party B lacked immunity to certain diseases. Hell, in 1710 the Russian Army was using catapults to fling the bodies of bubonic plague victims within the wall of cities they held under siege.

I for one don't want you or anyone you know owning such weapons, ICBMs, ballistic missiles, etc.

Note that the Second Amendment provides no exclusions regarding what arms the citizens are allowed to own and carry

The First Amendment provides no exceptions of any kind to free speech, but nevertheless we accept that there are reasonable limits that can be placed on certain things and then we just spend the rest of time arguing about what is "reasonable".

Screaming "fire" in a crowded theater, libel and slander, revealing military secrets, etc. These are considered reasonable restrictions on the right of free speech.

Same with the 2nd Amendment. There may be a lot more argument over where 'reasonable' is, and I think i

Before you blame post-9/11 security paranoia, this law was made to cover spacecraft in good ol' 1998. Dumb government bureaucracy can happen even in peaceful, profitable times.

No it wasn't. ITAR was enacted in 1976, in the midst of the Cold War, and it's always included far more than just anything related to spacecraft. It was originally meant to restrict a lot of different technologies, and has since been expanded to even cover software and algorithms of certain sorts. It covers both technology and goods, and the list of what is covered is enough to make you want to put a gun in your mouth and "export" your brains all over the wall. It's a truly nightmarish thing to comply with in today's world, if you handle any interesting technology development whatsoever.

Not to mention the fact that what does or doesn't fall under the ITAR umbrella is open to interpretation and changes almost daily. Shit, I remember when Xenix implementations that had the crypt() routine in libc.a were not allowed to leave the country.

I used to work with avionics systems that were ITAR controlled. To comply with regulations, we had to keep the hardware locked away when we weren't using it. Then all of a sudden, one day the flight logs generated by the hardware fell under ITAR control, so we had to delete all the logs from our servers, and even some of the software we wrote to analyze the flight data. Very frustrating.

Ya. The work I do is (or at least was) constantly butting up against ITAR. You'd be surprised how easy it is to be in violation and the penalties are pretty effing severe if you get caught. We have training every year to fresh and remind us how to not potentially commit a company-ending mistake. Usually we come out of said training ticking off the various infractions that may have occurred in the past or even semi regularly.

You'd also be surprised what all falls under the label "arms" as our company is

ITAR serves an important purpose by stating what technologies/goods should not be given to other countries because they comprise munitions or technologies related to them. But the trick is that controlling information is a problematic thing, especially when you get into esoteric aspects of technology. It gets even worse with "dual-use" technologies. A while back, Toshiba fell afoul of similar rules when they shared technology they use in their washing machines with a company in the USSR. Unfortunately, that same technology is also used to make quieter screws (propellers, for you land-loving sorts) for ships, and thus, submarines. At one point, the 128-bit encryption-capable version of Internet Explorer was equally prohibited for export.

The rules also seem totally nuts when you see how they play out. You can discuss things with US Citizens, but only if you're in the US. Unless you're abroad, but in a place the US controls. But not if you're in the US and there's a person here on a visa nearby.

Toshiba sold four 5-axis milling machines and four 4-xis milling machines to the USSR. In its export application, Toshiba Machine falsely described the machinery as two-axis machine tools. Anything over two-axis violates COCOM.

Read that again: Toshiba didn't innocently stumble into the export of a dual-use machine that might or might not have been approved depending on bureaucratic review whims, they flat out lied in order to export machines which were explicitly and unconditionally prohibited.

Probably due to the fact that a 4 and 5 axis milling machine would be amazing for creating the physics package of a nuclear warhead? At least that would be my guess. I mean you wouldn't be able to do much with a 2 axis machine... and there are other things you could undoubtedly create with such a milling machine, besides nuclear bombs. I'm sure you could shape other materials into useful items for war.

The ITAR laws are retarded and don't help anyone except foreign companies competing with American companies. PGP was banned but apparently printing out the source code and mailing it was legalâ"freedom of speech, duh!!! Why bother? We're not the only source for dual use technologies. Russia, France, Germany et al are all willing to supply the stuff so who cares?

Which is why any company with half a brain and a foreign subsidiary will take any R&D that has the remote possibility of being classified as 'dual use' and move it overseas. Then you can kiss your US job goodbye.

I wish it was restricted to dual use. I worked in the defense industry building stuff for the Navy, but no weapons, only commercial grade stuff. ITAR applies to that too. Our ITAR specialists use this example: If you buy a coffee pot off of the shelf of Wal-Mart, it is not ITAR controlled. If you now paint that coffee pot gray to fit to a Navy standard, and is in all other ways identical to the black one you bought, it is now a Defense Article and is ITAR controlled. Just by painting it the color the Navy wants.

We ran into issues several times where we were given permission to tell a Canadian company what we wanted (called a TAA, granted by the State Dept and takes about 6-8 months to process), basically giving them performance specs of a system we wanted so they could quote us a system that met those specs. It came in, but there was a defect. So we sent it back to get it repaired. By sending back our supplier's own product to his facility to get a defect fixed, we violated ITAR because we were not given the right to export material, only data (that's called an MLA, and can take 10-14 months to process).

And by the way, the term is not US Citizens. You can't use US Citizens, because under ITAR rules the definition of a US citizen doesn't invalidate that person from ITAR regulations (he may be a dual citizenship person, or a US citizen who is on a watch list). The term is non-US person.

I never can understand uproar on ITAR, etc. when we export our design and engineering overseas. Geez, foreign countries don't need spies, they just hang out on their turf and we'll send them the factory and design labs.

The rules also seem totally nuts when you see how they play out. You can discuss things with US Citizens, but only if you're in the US. Unless you're abroad, but in a place the US controls. But not if you're in the US and there's a person here on a visa nearby.

To give an example relevant to the original story, I worked for many years on the International Space Station. Note the International part. Nonetheless, when we had visitors from our foreign partners, we had to cover up our whiteboards and computer monitors lest they see some forbidden data. This being a piece of hardware occupied by foreigners most of the time once it's in orbit. Pretty silly, right?

A great example was PGPi, the European "International" version of PGP. If you took a copy of the software into the US, you weren't allowed to take it back out again.

The article has others, such as the guy who was banned from seeing the NASA commentary on code he'd written for them under contract because he wasn't cleared. (He can be given a contract, but be banned from completing it? Impressive.)

25 years or so ago, a UK government department was forbidden from selling a Cray supercomputer to, I think it was UCL (University College, London), by the American government because UCL had Russian students. There were rather unveiled threats made, as I recall, by the American government, which declared that all US semiconductors were US soil regardless of what country they were in.

I'm dual-national US/UK, and have run into similar problems myself when working on US government projects as my "official" nationality varied between individuals.

In short, ITAR and similar restrictions are routinely abused - and even when not abused are a severe constraint on US progress AND a crippling influence on relationships between the US and Tier 1 nations.

...from time to time, and it's a big problem. Anything "cool" is illegal for US citizens to export. Gen3 nightvision or any nightvision related accessories. Sling mounts, rifle stocks etc, all ITAR'd even if it's just a piece of bent metal. And even if china is already mass producing it.Even if there's already (overpriced) distributors outside of US, you can't. Does it matter if "terrorists" has to spend 3000usd instead of 2500usd on a piece of kit?

Those regulations hapmper everybody. The folks in the gun lobby will tell you that they are a backdoor attempt at gun control and they make a good case (if you're a firearms accessories and parts merchant, you literally can't drop a simple magazine spring in a box and mail it abroad without mounds of expensive paperwork) until you realize that it screws up *everybody*. Anything can be defined as "arms" if you're willing to stretch the term enough to server your particular agenda and, under ITAR, it's been stretched to a ridiculous degree, already. The anecdotes in the article (yes, I read it, so flog me) are just the tip of the iceberg.

working in the aerospace field, I have to deal with ITAR related issues all the time. It's is really burdensome for the industry outside the US and, in the end, mostly hurting the US Industry. Having such regulation within the NATO countries is quite silly if you ask me and it is the best incentive for those nations to develop their own industry. In the end we always get parts or expertise outside of the US if we have a choice.

But don't think the grass is greener everywhere. Other countries have similar export regulations that aren't any less a PITA. I quickly think problems we have with BAFA [www.bafa.de] in Germany, although those issues are nowhere as complicated as those create by ITAR.

On many project requirements, you find on top of the list "No ITAR regulated parts/software/whatever"... and this trend is expending as people learn to work without new providers outside of the US and these providers gain the required expertise. Hell! Even some US projects now aim for systems without any ITAR regulated components! Your guess on the impact of such a trend on the US industry is just as good as mine.

I dealt with ITAR all the time too last year. When you mentioned Germany, I am reminded of a funny situation. Like here, they also have strict export restrictions. For one item that was already imported from there and in our hands, additional paperworked needed to be filled out so it was proposed to ship the item back to Germany and then immediately import it back to the US.

Agreed that there are problems everywhere (I'm firmly convinced that the Norse were onto something with their mythology of Loki - we see evidence of it in every government). Agreed that such regulations hurt everyone -- NASA's "Beowulf" software was classified as munitions for a while, as I'm sure older Slashdot readers will remember. It resulted in the software being smuggled into Canada and developed there.

I would want to ask the US Congress this - is the US truly made stronger, more capable and more comp

I have a (UK) project involving a certain chip manufactured by Rockwell. There is an exceptionally terse datasheet available online. I asked for a a little more, and Rockwell, while courteous, basically declined to help me, citing ITAR. The chip is a CCD (sensitive to the infra-red), but otherwise nearly obsolete, and the datasheet I wanted was something similar to the common documentation for the 555 timer chip. The idea that I might build a guided missile out of this thing is laughable.

Yes, all Infrared imaging systems, or part thereof, are protected under ITAR. Nobody (maybe some stlll do) in Europe buys IR detector in the US anymore for this reasons. That's one place where the German, French and Israeli industries gained a lot because of ITAR.

Slow approvals yes, but why would I want to arm somone who had expressed unfriendly intentions

Because when the definition of "arms" is sufficiently broad, or when the people in charge are unqualified to decide what should and should not be covered, these regulations are classic examples of government gone berserk.

As long as the bad guys can buy the same defense-rated coffee pot or whatever from China, then all we've done is shoot ourselves in the foot. (Oh, and by restricting free trade, we're also giving

True, those were a bad example of something with "literally" no civilian applications.

But that just reinforces my point. ITAR didn't do jack shit to keep isotope-separation centrifuges out of the Iranians' hands... but a brief glance at the comments in this thread will show plenty of cases where ITAR has served to impede perfectly innocuous economic activity.

That suggests that ITAR is written and enforced by a bunch of power-hungry bureaucrats who are either out of touch with the real-world effects of thei

That's why it's important to fill out the forms accurately and be in touch with the people who interpret the regulations. I found that the process usually goes smoothly once the appropriate people are involved with the significance (or insignificance) of the product.

I used to work for a large satellite operator that, at one time, was an NGO. As a non-US company, ITAR didn't apply, and because of the nature of the work, it attracted talent from all over the world.

Then it went to private ownership, and the division I worked for here in the US suddenly became subject to ITAR. We had some time to prepare before the transition, but we had to start jumping through all sorts of hoops to ensure compliance. There were cases where people (mainly subsystems engineers) could not p

In their last report to Congress last month, the DOD very specifically detailed how they wished to *relax* the ITAR constraints: seehttp://www.defense.gov/releases/release.aspx?releaseid=15198 [defense.gov] who just points the report itself.From the exec. summary:"In summary, the Departments agree that maintaining non-critical satellites and related components on the USML and monitoring low-risk launch activities provide limited national security benefits. Moreover, this practice places the U.S. space industrial base at a